In-house lawyers at any grade/title may well be the counselor to clients who have higher grades/titles. Rank disparity makes no difference to most clients but a few may exclude their “lower ranking” lawyer, especially if they invite only a certain level of employees to limited-attendance meetings or communicate confidential information only to a certain level of employee.

This mismatch is not a function of pay inequity, but a perception imbalance. No pat solution exists, but the alert general counsel should quash such misbehaving clients.